About Never Ending Stories

Joris Dormans (2004)

Never Ending Stories is my pet project. It is an attempt to
write a long work (between 80,000 and 100,000 words, or 200-250
printed pages) about narrative games. The title is not very
original, and might change in the future. It does, however, express
some basic notions that surround the idea of interactive storytelling
in games: our hunger for ever new stories. But in contrast it also
expresses more indirectly that in fact the number of stories that are
told is rather limited, etc. There is more to it, but since the title
is not yet permanent I will not go in to details about it right now.

Narrative Games you say?

Yep, that's right. In game studies there have been quite some
debates on games and narratives. And many scholars of games think the
two concepts are incompatible. There appear to be two academic camps
within the academic field. On the one side there are the
narratologists who study games alongside with other
storytelling media, such as literature, drama and interactive
fiction. Prominent members of this camp are Janet Murray and
Marie-Laude Ryan (or at least they are often made prominent
narratologists by the opposition). On the other side there are the
ludologists, those that wish to study games as games. They
argue that narrative is only a small portion of what makes games
interesting (in fact story is only a small insignificant part of many
games). The ludologists are more interested in elements of gameplay.
Prominent ludologists are Jesper Juul and Markku Eskelinen.

Then there are those that hold some sort of middle ground. Henry
Jenkins is one of those, and like some others stresses that there are
games that do hold some sort of narrative aspiration, even though the
basic structure of these narratives differs from the basic structures
of classic (linear) storytelling. In this new type of narrative the
"pleasure in the process – in the experiences along the
road – that can overwhelm any strong sense of goal or
resolution, while exposition can be experienced as an unwelcome
interruption to the pleasure of performance" (2002). To
appreciate this type of story requires us to abandon the idea that
close knit causality is synonymous with good story telling: "Spatial
stories are not badly constructed stories; rather they are stories
which respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging
spatial exploration over plot development. Spatial stories are held
together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by
the character's movement across the map" (ibid). Games
narrative fall inline with a tradition of storytelling to which,
according Jenkins, authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Jules Verne and Homer
also more or less belong. What is more "[w]hen game designers
draw story elements from existing film or literary genres, the are
most apt to tap those genres – fantasy, adventure, science
fiction, horror, war – which are most invested in world-making
and spatial story-telling. Games, in turn, may more fully realize the
spatiality of these stories" (ibid).

Narrative games thus stand in a tradition that is generally
considered to be weak in narrative. Where this might be reason for
some to abandon the concept of game narratives or dismiss them as
uninteresting, it prompted me to reinvestigate what is generally
understood to be the narrative form. For dismissing the plot of an
average game, fantasy novel or action film is one thing, denying the
pleasure and cultural significance of reading, seeing and playing
them is another altogether. Just as Geoff King (2000) looks for the
cultural significance of Hollywood blockbusters in the structural
oppositions that underpin their narrative framework I will turn my
attention to a similar aspects in narrative games, among others, in
order to escape the narrow causal and temporal definition of story
common in the study of literature.

Note that I keep using the term narrative game. This is to
focus this work on a very particular cultural artefact and to
distinguish it from a few related types of objects such as
non-narrative games (such as Space Invaders, Tetris, and many action
oriented first-person shooters) and interactive, non-game narratives
(such as hypertext novels and interactive cinema).

Role-playing

Many game researches note a similarity between computer games and
pen-and-paper role-playing games but most of them spend only few
words on them. And when they do they do not tend to be very positive:
"All too often, these games descended (at least in personal
memory) into little more than a sequence of 'open the door, kill the
monster, grab the gold, open the next door, kill the monster, grab
the gold…'" (Atkins 2003: 40). Pen-and-paper
role-playing is often equated with Dungeons & Dragons,
which is akin to equating all computer games with the type of play
encountered in Space Invaders. In fact, serious role-players
find that pen-and-paper role-playing has more to do with storytelling
than most computer games do. In their eyes the latter are often mere
character-builders that might be interesting for 'power gamers' than
those who express a wish to act out a character and have fun with a
couple of friends. Apart from the odd article (for example Tosca
2003) role-playing games have attracted very serious interest. As a
genre it is even more obscure than computer games. One of the aims of
this work is to rectify this omission. After all when we talk about
narrative games, why leave out pen-and-paper role-playing games?

Pen-and-paper role-playing games are slightly younger than
computer games. The later can trace their history back to 1961
(Spacewar) or 1958 (Tennis for Two), although computer
games really took off in the early seventies with games like Computer
Space and Pong, and the launch of the Magnavox Gaming
system (see DeMaria & Wilson 2004; Kent 2001; Poole 2000).
Dungeons & Dragons, the first role-playing game was
published in 1974, but quickly inspired other systems and in turn
gave birth to the computer game genres of the text adventure and
later the computer role-playing game. One very good reason to include
role-playing games in the study of narrative games is that they have
had the chance to explore narrative games for 30 years without any
technological limits. The mind does not need to limit the size of
a game world to a finite number of bytes. Also, the game master (or
dungeon master) as a mediator of the game world is a lot more
sophisticated than his or her equivalent in computer games, able to
improvise and tailor the stories s/he tells to the likings of the
players far better than has been achieved in any computer game. This
work explicitly taps into the experience of storytelling in
pen-and-paper role-playing games that has accumulated over the years.

A Model of Gaming

Never Ending Stories investigates how narratives can emerge
from the interaction with a gaming system (a game system on a
computer or the particular machinations of a game master and the
rules of a role-playing game). The game system and the player can be
said to perform three functions: 1) a game simulates a
fictional world, 2) the game presents this to the player and
3) the player acts accordingly (see figure 1). Games can vary
in the way it performs or allows the player to perform these
functions. The simulation of the game world may, for example, adhere
to a certain standard of realism (as in most first-person shooters)
or might model a total abstract universe (Tetris). Likewise a
game's presentational form might focus on narration (text
adventures), spectacle (action games), or drama (some role-playing
games), among other things.

figure 1 – A model of gaming

What is important in this model, is that insofar some games are
narrative games, they are story-engines that produce narrative
game-texts. Only the latter are stories. One of the problems of
studying games and their stories is that the game text is extremely
transient. It exists only during a gaming session and while computers
can produce screenshots or record game sessions there is no
equivalent for pen-and-paper role-playing games. What is left to
study is the narrative disposition of the gaming system. Or how
stories might emerge from them.

Emergence is a key concept in many modern theories of games and
computers. Sherry Turkle (1995) discusses emergence as a key concept
in the development of our thinking about computers and our own
intelligence. Jesper Juul (2002) sees emerging gameplay directly
opposed to the progressive nature of author-controlled stories. While
Jenkins (2002) sees emergent narratives as an important factor in the
success of The Sims and EverQuest. In this work I
actively try to develop a framework how stories can emerge from
narrative game systems. In my opinion emergent narratives are the way
forward for the further development of narrative games. It is a
concept that needs to be explored further if we wish to escape the
branching tree plots that dominate ideas about interactive
narratives. To me it is not a question whether 'readers will ever be
ready for tree fiction' to paraphrase Gareth Rees (quoted in Ryan
2001: 262) but to find a better framework for narrative games that
focus on the way narratives can emerge from more or less
indeterminate game systems.

Work in Progress

Never Ending Stories is a work in progress. I have planned
9 chapters and so far written rough drafts of four of them. I plan to
extract some articles from the material I have gathered for this work
during the process of writing Never Ending Stories. As a
result this text is still in flux. I will try to keep it accessible,
so you can refer to it if you wish. Anyways, the proposed contents
for Never Ending Stories is:

Chapter 1 – What's the story?
Discussion of what is considered to be a story in literature;
Discussion of the sometimes problematic relation between games and
stories;

Chapter 2 - Narrative Computer Games
Exposition of computer games and narrative computer games in
particular; A model of gaming (see also above)

Chapter 3 – Pen-and-Paper Role-Playing Games
Exposition of pen-and-paper role-playing games based on interviews
and inspection of a lot of printed rule-books and modules; Discussion
of role-playing games in the light of the model of gaming;

Chapter 4 – Rules of Engagement
Exposition of game rules; Discussion of games and gameplay; Some
illustrations of good and bad game design;

Chapter 5 – Interactive Storytelling
Exposition of three common and one hypothetical types of
interactive storytelling structures: story trees, story-worlds, rails
and fractal stories.